We’ve been riding the Shriekback train for 42 years now, and my tour of duty with Barry Andrews himself dates back to the 1980 “League Of Gentlemen” for a 45 year run! While I’m open to interviewing anyone of interest within the scope of this site, there’s something to be said for having a discussion with an artist who occupies a lot of space in Ye Olde Record Cell. There was always something about Shriekback, with their distinct artistic POV that always spoke very strongly to me. A vigorous love of language was self evident in the tunes. And the subtext of science, history, and the humanities that added higher cultural frissons to what could often be music aimed at club floors, was entirely welcome and indeed, cherished.

We took the promo of the “Monument” album to our bosom for a few weeks prior to review, and after a suitable period of incubation, eventually probed a little bit beneath its surface for a few questions we were happy to lob to its creator. As revealed below.

BUT WE KNOW PLEASURE IS NOT THAT SIMPLE

Post-Punk Monk: Mr. A, Thanks for the opportunity to poke and prod the processes that have gone into the creation of “Monument,” the 18th Shriekback album. One of the scant delights that has occurred for me in the largely heinous 21st century is that I’ve been able to watch the Shriekback shelf in my Record Cell grow beyond belief with the bounty of the tireless march of material, both new and old, that you are seeing fit to record and release. So let me first thank you for your boundless energies in doing so.

Barry Andrews: Very kind of you to say, Monk. And great to hear. The old Tireless March does gets quite tiring sometimes, so it’s helpful.

P: There seems to be a heavy subtext on “Monument” on the conflict between hedonism and its opposite. Pleasure is explicitly noted in some songs while in others, anhedonia figures with equal prominence. I notice this because I’m an anhedonic from way back. [It’s that Monastic strain within me]. Given that in the sybaritic world of Rock, with pleasure always paramount, where does this situate Shriekback on the hedonic scale? Do you trust in Pleasure or is it better to hold it at arms length? To capitulate to or deny its persuasive power?

B: I most definitely do not trust pleasure – it’s lovely of course but, give it an inch… We numb our pain with pleasure, don’t we? That’s how you end up addicted: standard AA shit. I did a sad little tally the other day and worked out I’ve lost eleven friends to addictions of various kinds – most before their 60’s and all but one was a muso. As a deeply addictive personality myself I feel like I’ve dodged plenty of bullets. Mostly through lack of stamina, fortunately enough. I fear that the mortification of the flesh you no doubt practice is probably just the siren Pleasure wearing sack cloth and carrying a flail.

P: Speaking of “Not Designed For Pleasure,” the ironic pull between the heavy rave vibes and the bluntly anhedonic lyric gave lots of frissons of cognitive dissonance. A long-standing Shriekback attribute, which we always appreciate, but one lyric stuck out in particular as fairly reeking of specificity. So I searched on “drizzle me skinny” and found it to be a website full of Weight Watchers®️ recipes! Is its placement in “Not Designed For Pleasure” a side-eyed comment on lo-cal cooking as well as a restatement of the main theme?

WE FEEL LIKE GREEKS, WE FEEL LIKE ROMANS

P: Another leitmotif of the album was the Grecian myth of Ulysses, figuring in both “Ithaka” and “Monument.” Does this relate to the difficulty in finding one’s center or “home?” Especially at this late stage of the game? But could Shriekback ever find contentment in this fallen world? I can’t help but feel that it would be the ending of things for the band.

B: Well, yes, ‘home’ (greek: nostos’ – the root of the word ‘nostalgia’) and the human search for it are very much on the table here. ‘Home’ (as you imply) being maybe a metaphor for one’s true self and being at peace with it. There’s an argument that all of this nativism and tribal identity palaver that’s fucking everything up at the moment is, at heart, a longing for it – to be at home, to belong: to be with one’s People. Horrible things are usually based on perfectly understandable non-horrible things, I reckon. Like pleasure and addiction, now I think of it. The Classical World has much to teach us. Cavafy is ace, also. And too much contentment has never looked like being much of a problem (though I have certainly wished it otherwise).

P: In tracks like “The Curse, “Ithaka,” and “Plumed!” the songs indulge in Shriekback’s well-known penchant for ironic bombast [and especially shouty choruses]; always tempered by an underlying playful anarchy nipping at the heels of the song and effectively puncturing any predilection for pretension. Seeing as you always undercut the vibe lyrically, what is it about that sort of musical form that may have gotten its hooks into you at an early age? Did your mother happen to play recordings of Russian Folk Music as sung by a male chorus when you were in knee-pants? Where does that come from?

B: The mock heroic ironic bombast of which you speak is certainly a Thing isn’t it? I think it’s partly my early exposure to – and indeed resultant obsession with – Gilbert and Sullivan. I loved all that as a kid – (which made me a vulnerably quirky kid in 1960’s UK – ‘who’s your favourite Beatle?’ ‘I don’t know, I’m listening to Iolanthe’. You’d think the bullies of state schools in Swindon (of which there were plenty) would have exacted vengeance for this in the playground but luckily it made me too weird to bother with – the piano playing helped of course – ‘Dance Monkey!’ vibes).

P: On the massive opener, “The Curse,” you have managed to weave a Post-Punk thread via the synths through the retro Muscle Shoals vibe. Once more, two disparate theses are united in synthesis by Shriekback. Does such dialectical thinking result in the hybrid vigor of your music as a direct or perhaps unconscious goal? How much credit can you give to either intention or surrender in the art?

B: Well that’s probably being nice – Shriekback’s aesthetic has always been a bit of car boot sale of influences (which is good I think – it’s amazing what you can pick up!) plus I found that brass samples have come on by leaps and bounds since I last dabbled in them. I always wanted to be in a brass section since I went with Anto (sax player out the Waterboys) to see him jamming with – 80’s first call brass section – the Kick Horns at a pub in Hornsey in the day. I so wanted to be in their gang. Now the good folks at East West and their splendid LA Brass have made my pathetic dream come true.

P: Given the heavy nature of much of “Monument,” the “hit single” slot [side two, track one] on the album was given to the lightest moment here with “Idiot Dancing.” The four-to-the-floor rhythms and dance step lyrics allow for a glorious epiphany of euphoric stupidity amid the gritted teeth tension of much of the album. Given that Shriekback’s roots are as a dance band, your embrace of Disco energy over the years has been a definite thread…from “Sexthinkone” to “Get Down Tonight.” The latter I approved of, by the way. I must interject here that my friend Mr. Ware’s New Wave cover band [The Pragmatix] actually played the Shriekback version of “Get Down Tonight” [complete with rap!] in their live sets in the early 90s. Will Shriekback ever be to old for the Disco floor?

B: Back in this oft-mentioned Day – we Shrieks were all very much of the collective mind that to make music you could actually dance to was the pinnacle of pop music achievement. To make the bodies of other humans move! What could be sexier and more of a compliment to your edgy musical shamanistic skills than that? Well, fine, but, I think, to give no more than a clear-eyed appraisal of what we actually produced, our dancefloor provocations were far from unanswerable. Even Jam Science which Carl rightly describes as our attempt at a ‘resistance-is-futile dance album’ was – er – not really that danceable imo. It’s art rock really isn’t it – played by white rock musicians who’ve listened to a few 12” singles and thrown themselves around drunkenly in some hipster clubs (enough to know what’s supposed to happen). I think it’s an excellent album in its own terms but stick it on next to an ACTUAL dance record and the difference is obvious. My Spine – gets closest to something that compels movement, but – you know ‘Under the Lights’? Achtüng ? maybe some contemporary dancers (Michael Clarke springs to mind) might do some gestural motifs to them but horny, nicely-fucked-up club-goers not so much.

I don’t mind that anymore (mission creep is fine, these days) and I still do like playing around with the form – theoretical dance, if you will – ‘Not Designed..’ being an example. Oh and ‘Put Me To Work’ (from Contaminated Pop). And there’s the old Shriekback ’tinned tomato’ axiom (which is always useful in a tight spot) – ‘they’re not a whole lot like actual fresh tomatoes but they’re still pretty tasty’.

KARMA COULD TAKE US AT ANY MOMENT

P: Right now, the world is isn’t just teetering over a precipice [that’s almost the norm, historically], but leaping bodily into a very dark place. Just when you think it can’t get worse, “they” manage to pull the rug out from underneath us time and time again. Lowering the accepted thresholds in a way that suggests the Overton Window is on a vertical as well as a horizontal axis. You touch upon this throughout the Shriekback canon, most notably on “Monument” here with “Burn Book.” Given that you also paraphrase Henley’s “Invictus” in the memorable coda to “The Curse,” what proportion of Shriekback would you say is dedicated to being artistically reactive to these tragic external stimuli?

P: The vibe to “All My Crude Blunt Tools” was built on an abstract, Yello-esque vocal sample loop rhythm for what seems the first time ever in the long history of Shriekback. Coupled with a hint of Acid Jazz with a Post-modern 60s lounge vibe in the surprising coda. It felt like an outlier to something else in the established Shriek canon. Is there any chance you might explore this musical seam a bit further?

B: Yeah, thanks for noticing. That tune was an experiment that might have found itself on a Stic Basin album but for the necessity to make more Shriekback material. I remember having discovered a little software sampler on Logic that did lots of the things we used to do on Ye Olde Akai S1000 hardware beast (only much easier and better of course) and I thought I’d give it a whirl. The urge to ceaselessly muck about has not, I am glad to report, disappeared yet.

P: So you has a £40K take in crowdfunding for “Monument?” That’s got to be healthy. Thus far all of Shriekback’s crowdfunding campaigns [bar one – the US tour] have been a success. But we’re all getting older. How important is it to bring new blood into the fold so that your mailing list isn’t all gray haired geeks like myself?

B: New fresh faced young Shriek fans eh? yeah that would be great wouldn’t it? Likely though? In a chimp’s cock as the saying goes. I had the conversation often with Mart and Carl – particularly Mart – about how – HOW? – this inevitably diminishing demographic might be expanded but nothing we ever did after my Online Socials Initiative of 2010 (?) (Facebook page, mailing list and the Tumblr blog) ever moved the needle in terms of sales (the numbers swelled then plateaued then remained exactly the same and will probably for all time). My view was always: ‘everybody in the world who wants a Shriekback album now has one’.

Probable scenario: you saw us in Vancouver/Berlin/California in the day/your frat house danced to Nemesis/you saw Manhunter… and you were hooked. Bless you. Decades passed – the enthusiasms of youth receded as Life made its relentless demands but one night you casually Google’d ‘Shriekback’ after a few wines at 2 in the morning (there are no other Shriekbacks so it was simple) you were a bit surprised that we were still going and you got on the mailing list. Then you bought an album. And carried on buying/funding them.That’s it. there are no hidden Shriek fans anymore (not ones who would buy a record anyway). The most graceful attitude, I feel – as with all such diminishing returns in the face of death – is Acceptance.

SOMETIMES WE WOBBLE, SOMETIMES WE’RE STRONG

P: With Martyn Barker and Carl Marsh opting out of the Shriekback Golden Years Parade, does it sit well with you to make all of the creative decisions? Do you miss the artistic head-butting? Are you worried that the Shriekback gene-pool is too shallow to wade in with just yourself making the creative decisions? And finally, at this point would you open the door for any new members to roll into the Hall of the Shrieks?

B: I certainly don’t miss arguing with other old geezers about whether one should add (say) a string sample in the chorus or not. I hate all that. I do miss the Otherness of other people though – when they do things that you never would have thought of by yourself. On balance, though, I like being the director of the movie – it really is hard enough getting something right without having to factor in other people’s opinions, and yet…yet… conflict sometimes produces beautiful things (qv Oil and Gold). Rock bands are odd that way – I don’t at all rule out a return of Barker and Marsh – if they really wanted to do it – but ‘passive commitment’ (as Fripp said to me once) ‘will effect the collapse of a structure’ and that will never do.

I don’t think I’m anywhere near the most talented member (or ex-member) of Shriekback but my superpower is that I really, really CAN BE BOTHERED to do this. And I always have felt like that. If people want to get onboard, great, but these records are going to get made no matter what. ‘My blood is on the land’ …’Here I stand, I can do no other’ … that sort of thing.

P: You’ve been playing guitar for a few years now and I note the surgical inclusions throughout the album. Apart from Mike Tournier of Fluke, who made the music bed for “Wasps In Heaven,” are you making all of the music here or are there guest artistes…beyond Sarah and Wendy Partridge on vocals and Kat Evans’ violin?

B: Surgical Inclusions! Yeah absolutely that – as in grafting the shark cartilage onto the Pomeranian’s head – or like a field amputations during the Napoleonic Wars. My guitar skills are deeply rudimentary but, crudely, simply, get the job done, I think. The music on Monument is – apart from Kat and the Sids and Mike T. on ‘Wasps’ – is all me.

P: So thanks for your time and consideration. The musical nutrients that Shriekback offer the world have long been an important part of my musical diet and I’ve enjoyed the 42 year ride so far…barring “Go Bang!”

P: Well, I’ve been wanting to revisit that one for some time now [regretting its careless removal from the Record Cell] so that we could dig our heels in for a Shriekback Rock G.P.A. reviewing each album for what would undoubtedly take weeks. And there’s always the expanded DL version in the Shriekback webstore calling me like a siren. So until then, stay frosty, Mr. A!

B: I will certainly try, Jim. Thanks.

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